. We’ve already made our point about lacrosse trying to be a major league sport. The Wall Street Journal did its best this week by running a story on Wednesday citing the sports’ popular growth. It’s an old story. The best thing about lacrosse occurs this weekend when over 40,000 fans converge for a doubleheader on Saturday pitting Syracuse against Duke followed by Virginia against Cornell. This is followed by Sunday Division II and III championships and the Monday afternoon NCAA final.

This is as ritualistic as it gets. The weekend camraderie is unique. Even bitter rivals will pick you up drunk or point you to your tailgate. The fraternity of lacrosse is like no other. If you had a nickel for every pair of lacrosse shorts, flipflops, and old school baseball hats from lacrosse schools you’ll see up in Patriotland this weekend, you’d have enough money to sustain the pro lax leagues for years. Beer is the common denominator and dads with their stick wielding sons are hard to avoid.

On Monday, when Syracuse plays Cornell, the crowd will be slimmer, hungover or toasted, the sunburns in full bloom, and the visons of the long-haul rides home through Memorial Day traffic will be dancing in their aching heads.

I-90 will be especially full on Monday night westbound as the followings of the “Empire State Elite” return to Ithaca and Syracuse. Mark Monday night as a winner for all of New York.

Cornell is the 5th rated team in the nation and needed an all out effort to overcome #1 Virginia led by coach Dom Starsia and his ACC All Stars. What the Big Red have is the best midfielder in the nation in Max Siebold and an enterprising young coach in Jeff Tambroni, who is positioned to outsmart Starsia and prove, once-and-for-all, that Cornell losing Dave Petrimala back to his “homewood” at Hopkins was no big loss. Cornell blasted Virginia from the get-go and got hat tricks from Rob Pannell, Ryan Hurley and Chris Finn to take a 15-6 laugher.

Duke was once again at an advantage with at least five players on their roster playing in their fifth year. This, of course, is without counting red shirts. The extra years in this case being granted across-the-board by the NCAA (to prevent lawsuits) to compensate for the termination of their 2006 season due to their poor partying skills. Our best guess is that next year’s senior class will be the last of the “college PGs” at Duke (that’s not counting real red shirts). And the last year that every other team in the NCAA will be able to say “can you imagine how good we’d be if we could have kept so-and-so, so-and-so and so-and-so for another year? Fewer lacrosse fans will be pulling for the Devils than pull for Coach K’s team when Mike Patrick, Billy Packer and Dick Vitale are announcing. Syracuse rewarded those pulling against the Devils with a 17-7 thrashing.

In a related item of equal importance, the WNBA has begun its preseason. The professional women continue to make better salaries than the pro lax players, even though their game is ill-attended, noncompelling and in dire need of its NBA subsidy to stay alive.

Still no word from either Selena Roberts or John Feinstein on whether they thought their Duke lacrosse team coverage was wrong in 2006.